Dr. Strained-Love Reads MRI Results or How I Learned that I am an Old Haggard Bag of Broken Bones

Look Ma! No boot! That’s right, after almost two weeks in the boot, on Monday while reviewing my MRI results, Dr. McBestie said I could ditch my Frankenstylish accessory.

However…

I got to ditch dasboot because it was apparently making things worse.

Doc M-B took one look at my MRI and asked if the boot hurt. I informed him that in fact it did, and he responded, ‘yeahhhhh, no more boot.’ The MRI confirmed the stress fracture, and on those pictures I could actually see the little white (bastard) line of pain bisecting my calf. There was also some burgeoning damage around my ankle and stress to the bottom of my foot he chalked up to leftover from a sprain at some point in my past. (Who knows?) But all in all, not nearly as bad as I was afraid of.

I’m off running for a while obviously, and Dr. McBestie put the fear of Mo Farah in me when he warned the fracture could take four to six months to heal if I don’t pull way back and listen to my body. I’m allowed to swim, (why must it always come back to swimming?) to use the elliptical, (which goes against everything I believe in,) and to bike and spin as long as I keep my ass in the saddle.

As frustrating as this has all been I’m hoping we’ve turned a corner on the endless parade of stress fractures by digging into their underlying causes this time. Through this third annual round of right leg infirmities I demanded answers more useful than ‘yeah it’s broken again.’ The mutual best interests served by getting rid of me for good this year were not lost on Doc McB and he obliged my request for some House-type diagnostic magic.

Likely deriving keen insight from his burning desire to never see me again, Dr. McFrenemy dug into the underlying cause of the repeated fractures asking me some uncomfortable questions about personal topics. (TMI perhaps but suffice it to say, it’s weird when your orthopedist asks about topics usually reserved for lady docs.) With a few well-placed interrogatories he’d alighted on the fact that my first physical in ten years last spring had awarded me a mostly-spotless bill of health, with one exception: my body pretty much just doesn’t produce Vitamin D.

Vitamin D is that important lil nutrient that enables your body to absorb calcium, which is that wee mineral critical to bone density. And bone density is that thing apparently crucial to keep your bones from crumbling like sun chips when you submit them to high impact fun like running. Apparently I have the bone density of a sedentary septuagenarian and my tibias have the consistency of cheetoes.

Vitamin D deficiency is pretty common for ladies, and as it’s generally derived through sun exposure, vain wrinkle-phobes like me, who wield an ever-present shield of sunscreen – even in winter – may find themselves especially lacking in the so-called “sunshine vitamin.” If this is indeed the root cause of my injuries, that’s exciting news because a vitamin deficiency is pretty reversible.

I’m now obviously on Sunshine D supplements, and calcium supplements to supplement the other supplements. And I’m definitely doing my part to speed the process along: I have made a legitimate effort adding extra milk servings and replacing some of my breakfast food binges with greek yogurt. And yesterday I really dug in when I opened that second wheel of goat cheese I let Trader Joe sweet talk me into, and today I had grilled cheese for lunch and they gave me FOUR SLICES!! (It makes unassailable sense to eat twice as much cheese at the same time you cut your workouts in half. That must be why my not-usually-compression-tights carved painful impressions into my mushy “obliques” and cut off circulation to my feet last night!)

So basically my ankle is probably already pretty much cheese-healed. And hopefully soon I will no longer have potato chip bones and I can move beyond senior living water aerobics. Because it’s getting about time to plan race season 2015…